Sitting on Defence

Well, I had better make a start on the Bolshy Manifesto somewhere, and it might as well be Defence of the Realm, given that today is Remembrance Day and on the way to the Lakes on Sunday we saw a World War II Dakota complete with authentic paint job, flying over the M62. Unless it was a hallucination of course.

I am not, technically, a pacifist. I wish I was. I have to say, though, that my desire and admiration for the British way of life is such that I can foresee a situation where, if the invaders were at the gates, I would be there, lined up alongside such of my countrymen who were prepared to stop them invading. Not that I would be any practical use but, as a moral relativist, I have to concede there are times when, if for instance another Hitler came along and could not be stopped by any other means, then you might, in extreme circumstances, have to resort to violence.

Unfortunately, this also then implies the need for professional armed forces to defend the country, and all that this entails. And, in an uncertain world, where the idiots in charge of our foreign policy have been wedged so far up Bush’s chuff they haven’t seen daylight for years, we’ve now made a lot of enemies. Which is why, unfortunately, reluctantly (see how those words recur like a tolling bell), we’ve got to replace Trident. I know, I can hear the howls from here. And it ties us in to the Americans. I know, I know. (I’m assuming a slippery operator like Blair made Trident help a condition of being America’s “Blind Ally” this last few years, and if he didn’t, he’s a bloody fool.)

In the question of Trident, I find myself reflecting that it’s like the situation where ideally, you would like to go to the shops but you are actually stuck up to your ankles in an unfamiliar peat bog in the middle of nowhere, it’s getting dark and it’s coming on to rain, you’ve got no torch and you’ve lost your map. Ideally, given the choice, you wouldn’t start from here.

So it is with Trident. Ideally, the Bolshy Party wouldn’t start from here, but given that, by slavishly following the Primrose Path of dalliance promoted by Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld, we’ve now made ourselves the target for every hothead east of the Euphrates with an AK-47 (and quite a lot west of the Euphrates as well), it seems we have no choice. Great legacy, George, Tony, thanks a lot.

However, this doesn’t mean we want to go exporting aggression. It’s perfectly possible to be proud of England without feeling then obliged to invade France (or Iraq). I can see (sort of) an intellectual justification for invading Afghanistan, given that it was a hotbed of fanaticism, but someone should have a) asked the question – what is it about the USA that these people hate so much that they are willing to fly planes into buildings and kill themselves in the process? and b) someone should have taken Bush aside and told him that western armies have very poor track records of invading and subduing Afghanistan, ever since the North-West Frontier wars of the nineteenth century.

Another justification for invading Afghanistan was the plight of Muslim women under the Taleban. Yes, this was pretty dire, but is it possible to coerce an entire religion, especially in a situation where the most militant fringe of it has gained political power by force, into making 600 years of progress in half-a-dozen? Islam and Islamic scholars kept the flame of knowledge alive in the Middle Ages, providing the vital link back to Classical Greek and Roman thought and texts that fuelled Western Europe’s Renaissance. Yet militant Islam is still stuck in the 1100s, when it comes to the place of women, especially. But you can’t bomb someone forward to civilisation, you can only bomb them back to the Stone Age.

So, for these reasons, it’s Bolshy Party Policy to withdraw straightaway from the American-induced adventurism in Iraq. Their mistake, their mess, they can stay and clear it up if they still want the oil, which they will do, even under Obama, I predict. There will be US involvement in Iraq for generations yet, military bases and military “advisers”, private security firms (mercenaries or contractors, depending on who you talk to) and joint exercises.

We would use the men, weapons and materiel freed up by the withdrawal from Iraq to ease the strain on the UK contingent in Afghanistan, while planning a phased withdrawal from there, too. The women will have to be helped by other means – by intellectually challenging the bankrupt assertions of the Taleban and their questionable spiritual authority.

The possession of professional armed services doesn’t mean, either, that you have to use them for fighting. Every year there are scores of disasters, natural or otherwise, around the world which require specialist logistical expertise in relief efforts. Even in the UK, when we get the by now regular floods each summer as a result of climate change. I look forward to the day when the Army, Navy and Air Force have largely morphed into a sort of global logistics and rescue service – a bit like International Rescue but with fewer "strings" attached. A plane can be used to drop food aid instead of bombs. A temporary bridge can allow food convoys to cross a swollen river, rather than tanks.

The Bolshy Party believes that it is perfectly possible to be proud of the achievement and expertise of our nation’s armed forces without that translating over into a sort of gung-ho Little Englander patriotism that sees its mission in the world as being to teach Johnny Foreigner what’s what, keep him in his place, and give him a bloody nose.

The only justifiable intervention outside of the UK, apart from humanitarian aid, should be in the pursuit of international law and justice, and this should be carried out rigorously, without fear or favour, if it is to be done at all, and certainly not done with a sort of lip service attitude, only in areas where it suits the broad aims of US foreign policy.

Soldiers are probably the last people who want to go to war:

Soldiers who wanna be heroes
Number practically zero
But there are millions
Who want to be civilians

- that old protest song from the Vietnam era of the 1960s has it more or less right. So, in those circumstances, we at the Bolshy Party do not consider that if you wear your poppy on Poppy Day, for instance, you are automatically glorifying war. We see it, on the contrary, commemorating all of the countless millions of ordinary blokes and women who didn’t particularly want to go to war, who were quite happy where they were, thanks very much, but who, when the call came, put down their spades, their scythes, their tools, their pens and marched to meet the challenges.

There are different reasons for remembering the dead of the two different wars. For the dead of the First World War, men such as Harry Fenwick and William Evans, we remember the waste and the futility, the sadness of all those millions of unfulfilled lives. For the dead of the Second World War, at least on the Allies’ side, those emotions are also mingled with a kind of thanks for stopping Hitler – or stopping the Hitler war fascist machine. For the dead on the German side, again, there is only sorrow at unfulfilled lives. And of course, potentially the most tragic waste of that conflict, the millions of innocent civilians who were killed, wounded or displaced, some of the consquences of which we still feel today, in the Arab-Israeli standoff.

So to sum up, the policy of the Bolshy Part on defence is: we’ve got to start from where we are, not where we’d like to be, and the longing we feel for where we’d like to be is irrelevant in that context. We’ve got to extract our troops from the two areas in the world where at present all they are doing is providing targets for fanatics. Ideally, in Afghanistan, if we can improve the lot of women by continuing to challenge militant Islam intellectually, if we can cut off the Taleban’s funding by buying up the opium crop and turning it into diamorphine for the NHS, there are still things we can do to pull out the troops without leaving the Afghans in the lurch.

We’re stuck with Trident’s replacement, but that doesn’t mean that we have to go looking for excuses to lose it. It’s a deterrent.

Finally, let’s not also forget that the government gets an easier ride thanks to the efforts of the British Legion and other people who deal with the welfare of veterans. You can say this about many charities. The government gets off lightly in many areas where they should be spending money wisely because goodhearted people who recognise a need for action, get stuck in and sort it out. I’ve written about this dilemma before, in the context of overseas aid.The problem is, if the charities go on strike, it isn't the government that gets hurt by that, it's the people or cause the charity was trying to assist, but no, we should never let our politicians get away with short-changing the people who fought their battles for them.

And it’s possible to be proud of our armed forces without indulging in gung-ho patriotism, and it would be possible to be even more proud of them if we succeed in turning their planes into ploughshares. And if you wear a poppy, it doesn’t make you a war-monger – just the opposite, in fact.